Desktop Sharing with YuuGuu: Ubuntu 9.04

Initial Impressions of Yuuguu
I like the fact, a lot, that it runs on Linux. I hate trainiing on a Windows machine with a Linux virtual machine, it just doesn’t seem right. Yuuguu provides a training session with more integrity as it can all be done on Linux. It provides a greater experience for the Linux user as they have a complete picture of what is going on on the desktop.

That said, there are some features that are lacking in Yuuguu. First, as an instructor, tools are very important for providing a professional impression. The only available tool is that the mouse turns to a red dot. This will then highlight an area if you wanted to focus on that. When you are teaching from the command line, being able to highlight a section with a transparent color, just like GoToMeeting, provides an excellent tool for users to focus on the discussion. It is easy to lose users when you cannot highlight properly. The other major factor, is that Yuuguu is slow, too slow. As an instructor, you will highlight, provide discussion, and then move on. However, in initial tests I found that the delay for the movement of the cursor could be as slow as 2 seconds when using the low quality imaging and as slow as 4+ seconds when the high quality image was chosen. That would mean as an instructor you would need to stop and let the cursor catch up each time…hard to discipline yourself to do and strange sounding to students with all of the pauses.

Text chat works fine. The only problem I see is that all students see your chat window as well as their chat window. That really does not make sense because as an instructor it is nice to have a window that students cannot see, as well you lose desktop space. The other feature lacking here is that you have no private chat, everyone sees what the instructor receives, no privacy for students. That will certainly cause some students to refrain from any comments as they will know that there is no private interface.

There is a Free version but it is limited to 100 minutes a month and only 5 users. So it will work OK for most situation but you will need to purchase in order to do much training, $9 a month is all.

Once you install Yuuguu you can select “Web Share” to provide access to your screen. Your users do not need to download anything but most will have a better experience if they do download and install Yuuguu.

When you choose Contacts or Web Share you can send an email to those users who you want to invite.

Once they receive invitation with the meeting ID they can login to the session from a window on yuuguu.com.